e, and a dozen
enthusiastic throats echoed the shout.

"Ay, down with Baccio Valori!" cried the Dominican.

"Down with Baccio Valori!" repeated the ductile crowd, its holiday
humor subtly passing into another form of recklessness. Some who loved
the Friar were genuinely worked upon, others in mad, vicious mood were
ready for any diversion. A few, and these the loudest, were
swashbucklers and cutpurses.

"Ay, but not Baccio Valori alone!" thundered Fra Giuseppe. "Down with
all those bastard growths that flourish in the capital of Christendom.
Down with all that hell-spawn, which is the denial of Christ; down
with the Pardoner! God is no tradesman that he should chaffer for the
forgiveness of sins. Still less--oh blasphemy!--of sins undone. Our
Lady wants none of your wax candles. It is a white heart, it is the
flame of a pure soul that the Virgin Mother asks for. Away with your
beads and mummeries, your paternosters and genuflections! Away with
your Carnivals, your godless farewells to meat! Ye are all foul. This
is no city of God, it is a city of hired bravos and adulterous
abominations and gluttonous feasts, and the lust of the eye, and the
pride of the flesh. Down with the foul-blooded Cardinal, who gossips
at the altar, and borrows money of the despised Jews for his secret
sins! Down with the monk whose missal is Boccaccio! Down with God's
Vicegerent who traffics in Cardinals' hats, who dare not take the
Eucharist without a Pretaster, who is all absorbed in profane Greek
texts, in cunning jewel-work, in political manoeuvres and domestic
intrigues, who comes caracoling in crimson and velvet upon his proud
Neapolitan barb, with his bareheaded Cardinals and his hundred
glittering horsemen. He the representative of the meek Christ who rode
upon an ass, and said, 'Sell that thou hast and give to the poor, and
come follow me'! Nay," and the passion of righteousness tore his frame
and thralled his listeners, "though he inhabit the Vatican, though a
hundred gorgeous bishops abase themselves to kiss his toe, yet I
proclaim here that he is a lie, a snare, a whited sepulchre, no
protector of the poor, no loving father to the fatherless, no
spiritual Emperor, no Vicar of Christ, but Anti-Christ himself."

"Down with Anti-Christ!" yelled a pair of Corsican cut-throats.

"Down with Anti-Christ!" roared the crowd, the long-suppressed hatred
of the ruling power finding vent in a great wave of hysteric emotion.

"Captain, do t